Boynton Beach hamburger stand integrated 50 years ago

In 2010, we asked Ineria Hudnell, the unofficial historian for black West Palm Beach, about how current generations are amazed there was a time when segregation once was the law. She said that’s really good, but also really bad.

Some victories were long in coming.

Some were paid in blood and pain. Other barriers fell with little fanfare.

That was the case 50 years ago this week. Back in the 1930s, before McDonald’s and Burger King became ubiquitous, a chain of hamburger joints dotted the South, mostly in Florida.

It was Royal Castle.

The name still sparks nostalgia for its small burgers and its birch beer.

But it also was part of the segregated south, and well into the 1940s and 1950s, blacks had to order from a side window.

On Sunday, Aug. 26, 1962, about 30 black teenagers converged on a Royal Castle at 502 N. Federal Highway, just north of Boynton Beach Boulevard and adjacent to a city fire station.

The teens were said to be high school kids from Fort Lauderdale

Without incident, they filled every seat, the counter man served them and they left.

The occurrence sparked only a small story in The Palm Beach Post. It quoted a local man — “a Boynton negro” — named Willie Miller who said some local blacks were on hand to give the teens “moral support.”

Boynton Beach police told the newspaper they’d heard of the incident but it never was officially reported to them.

The event was by no means the quietest in the local desegregation saga.

One weekend in the 1960s, Lake Lytal, who would serve a record 32 years on the Palm Beach County Commission, summoned workers to the county courthouse, where they painted over signs at drinking fountains that read “white” and “colored.”

The following Monday, when workers showed up, the facilities had been integrated for good.

The old Royal Castle site now is a vacant lot. The Royal Castle chain is long gone, side windows and all.

Update: After our June 28 column on the George Zapf beverage bottle — misspelled “Fapf” — Laura Thayer of Jupiter wrote to say she too had such a bottle, having found it in 1998 in the Intracoastal Waterway: “It would not have been easy to correct this error, so there are probably a lot more like them out there,” Thayer wrote.

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